Stop Believing These Myths About Link-in-Bio Pages

A friend of mine — she runs a small ceramics business out of her garage in Bristol — spent three years telling people to "check the link in her bio" and then sending them to exactly one URL. Her Etsy shop. That's it. If they wanted to see her process videos, her commission inquiry form, her newsletter, her local stockists? They had to dig. She'd convinced herself that link-in-bio tools were "for influencers" and looked cheap. Meanwhile she was leaving trails of confused potential customers behind every post.

When she finally set one up — properly, with some thought — she said it felt like "turning on a light in a room I didn't know was dark."

This piece is for everyone still navigating that dark room, held back by myths that honestly should have died years ago.

Myth #1: "You're Only Allowed One Link Anyway, So What's the Point?"

This is the most common one, and it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what's actually happening when someone clicks a link-in-bio tool.

Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Threads do restrict you to one clickable URL in your profile. That URL, however, can point to anything — including a page you control that hosts dozens of links, embeds, widgets, and buttons. The "one link" rule is about the profile field. It says nothing about the destination.

So when you drop a Linktree URL (or a Beacons page, or your own custom-built landing page) into that field, you're not cheating the system or doing something clever. You're just using the link field for what it's designed for: sending people somewhere useful. That somewhere happens to have multiple exits.

The constraint is real. The limitation it creates is not.

Myth #2: "Link-in-Bio Pages Tank Your SEO"

I hear this one from people who've half-read something about link equity and redirects and come away with vague anxiety. Let's untangle it.

The concern goes like this: if your bio link points to a third-party tool (Linktree, Stan Store, whatever), you're "wasting" the SEO value that could flow to your actual website. And in a narrow technical sense — yes, a link from Instagram to Linktree gives Linktree a backlink, not your site.

But here's what that argument gets wrong in practice:

First, links from Instagram profiles are nofollow. They don't pass PageRank. Search engines are explicitly told to ignore them for ranking purposes. The SEO value of your Instagram bio link was always zero, full stop. There's nothing to "waste."

Second, your link-in-bio page can — and should — contain a direct, prominent link to your website. So your user journey becomes: Instagram profile → bio link page → your website. If anything, a well-designed link-in-bio page can increase the number of clicks your website receives, because it gives visitors context before they commit to a destination. They know what they're clicking into.

Third, if you host your link-in-bio page on your own domain (which is an option most serious tools offer), the "wasted link equity" argument evaporates entirely. Your subdomain, your traffic, your brand.

SEO and link-in-bio tools are not in conflict. They exist on completely different planes.

Myth #3: "They Look Cheap and Unprofessional"

This one had some truth to it in 2018. The early era of these tools produced a lot of identical-looking pages — white background, stacked pastel buttons, font choices that aged poorly. If you've seen one, you've seen a hundred.

But that era is over, and it's been over for a while.

The better tools today let you do essentially anything: custom fonts, animated backgrounds, video headers, embedded music players, newsletter signup forms, countdown timers, product carousels, testimonial blocks. Done well, a link-in-bio page can look indistinguishable from a purpose-built landing page — because it is a purpose-built landing page, just with a very specific entry point.

The "cheap" look isn't a property of the tool. It's a property of putting five minutes into setup and calling it done. The same logic applies to any website builder: a Squarespace site can look stunning or it can look like it was thrown together in a lunch break. The tool isn't the variable. The care is.

There's also a subtle reframe worth considering: professionalism isn't about the technology you use. It's about the experience you give your visitors. A confusing, cluttered website with six competing calls to action is less professional than a clean, focused link-in-bio page that helps someone find exactly what they came for in under five seconds.

Myth #4: "Nobody Actually Clicks Them"

Some version of "I don't bother because no one uses it" floats around in creator circles, usually from people who set one up badly and then checked the analytics once.

The reality depends heavily on one thing: whether you actually tell people to use it.

Link-in-bio clicks don't happen passively. They happen because you say "link in bio" in a caption, in a story, in a reel, in a video end card. They happen because you've made your profile compelling enough that people visit it at all. They happen because when someone lands on your page, it immediately shows them something they want to engage with.

Creators who treat their link-in-bio page as a living document — updating it when they drop something new, featuring seasonal content, using it to drive specific actions during specific campaigns — consistently report it as one of their highest-converting traffic sources. Not because the tool is magic, but because it's the one place where a curious follower can turn into a subscriber, a buyer, or a booking.

If yours gets no clicks, the question isn't "do these things work?" The question is "what am I giving people a reason to click?"

Myth #5: "It's Just for Influencers Selling Merch"

This one comes from the tool's origin story. Link-in-bio pages got popular partly because influencers needed a way to manage affiliate links and brand partnerships. That history created an association that doesn't reflect the current reality at all.

Right now, the most practical users of link-in-bio tools include:

• Local service businesses — linking to booking pages, reviews, directions, menus
• Journalists and writers — archiving recent work without updating a full portfolio site every week
• Nonprofits — pointing supporters to donation pages, volunteer signups, and event registrations simultaneously
• Podcasters — linking to every platform in one place so listeners don't have to search
• Event organisers — featuring a single ticketing link prominently while keeping secondary info accessible
• Job seekers — linking to a portfolio, LinkedIn, CV download, and contact form from one professional URL they can put in email signatures

The underlying value — "I want to send people somewhere, and that somewhere should let them make a choice" — applies to nearly every kind of online presence. The influencer association is a quirk of marketing history, not a description of who these tools are actually for.

What Actually Makes a Link-in-Bio Page Work

Since we're debunking, it's worth being specific about what separates a page that does something useful from one that doesn't.

Prioritise ruthlessly. The impulse is to link to everything. Resist it. Three to five strong options, ordered by what you most want people to do right now, will outperform a wall of twelve links every time. People don't browse link-in-bio pages — they scan and make one choice. Make the right choice obvious.

Match it to your content cycle. If you just launched something, that should be the first thing people see when they arrive. If you're running a limited promotion, pin it at the top with a deadline. Stale pages — where the top link is to a webinar that happened eight months ago — signal disorganisation more clearly than any design choice.

Use your own domain if you can. Most serious tools offer this now, often on paid plans. Having your bio link be links.yourname.com instead of linktr.ee/yourname isn't about ego — it's about brand coherence and, practically, being able to switch tools without having to update the URL everywhere you've referenced it.

Check your analytics actually. Every decent tool tells you which links get clicked. Use that information. If your Spotify link gets fifteen times the clicks of your newsletter link, that's data about your audience. You might rethink what you feature, how you write caption CTAs, or what you're bothering to promote at all.

The Real Cost of Not Having One

My ceramics friend eventually worked out roughly how many commission inquiries she'd missed because interested people hit a dead end — her Etsy shop, which didn't have a contact form, which required creating an account just to message her. She doesn't know the exact number. Neither do I. But neither of us thinks it was zero.

The myths around link-in-bio tools mostly amount to sophisticated-sounding reasons to leave that friction in place. They're not based on how the tools actually work, what they actually look like when someone cares about them, or who they're actually for.

You've got one slot in your profile. The only question worth asking is whether you're making it work as hard as it possibly can.